Exhibition text by Amy Kazymerchyk

If I is a monster, so be it[i]

In dim light, the limestone facade of the Cap Blanc rock shelter in France’s Vézère Valley is unremarkable. But once illuminated, a frieze of horses, bison and ibex emerge across its surface. The form and weight of the animals is palpable, as if they are walking through the shelter. The effect is truly awe inspiring—holy, even. Cap Blanc presents one of the earliest known examples of relief sculpture from the Upper Paleolithic period, approximately 15,000 years ago. Sculptors of that epoch looked for geological features akin to an animal’s morphology that could be emphasized with flint, bone and antler tools.

This optical strategy calls to mind pareidolia: the phenomenon of identifying meaningful patterns and images in ambiguous matter such as clouds, water, wood grain and stone. Distortions created by the illumination of fire, the reflection of water, or the obfuscation of fog influence perception and interpretation. Apparently, people overwhelmingly perceive faces as well as human and animal figures in these elements as a way of identifying friend from foe, and of organizing one’s place in the universal order. This associative impulse has led humans to attribute earthly figures to star clusters, situate pantheons of gods in the clouds and personify volcanoes, mountains and lakes in origin myths.

As a practice of observing and addressing matter on its own terms, abstraction could be perceived as an exercise of resisting pareidolia. And yet, the methodology is frequently interpreted as a process of deconstructing or disfiguring something that is identifiable. The inclination to see ourselves in all of the matter around us may be hardwired. Our capacity to spar with this phenomenon is part of our inheritance.

Robin Arseneault’s Vapour Genie Pots (2025), modelled out of clay and cast in bronze, evoke this kind of pareidolic figuration. The white patina conceals the bronze with what looks like limestone or chalk, rendering the subtractive or additive nature of her process ambiguous. The crude appendages on each form may be perceived as bodily organs, fungal growths or mineral accretions, each in a different state of bloom or decay—a mercurial quality that Arseneault refers to as vaporous. Yet, in the title, she draws upon the figure of the pot—a vessel for storage, for fermentation and brewing, and for wishing or manifesting. These sculptures are accompanied by Vapour Wall Drapes (2025), a series of enlarged drawings of the pots, plotter-printed on vellum. Hung in proximity to the three-dimensional forms, the ink outlines suggest a flattening of perspective, much like an optical shadow or afterimage.

In 1950, Jean Dubuffet made a series of paintings and drawings titled Corps de dames (Bodies of ladies). In each work, the expression of a figure is stretched to fill the picture plane. Dubuffet’s additive and subtractive mark-making ignores the boundaries of the body and flattens it against the ground. In one black-ink drawing, a cloud of frantic, scribbled loops and blots composes a hefty form like a stone monolith, identifiable as a “lady” only by the denser patches of anatomically placed scribbles. These corps share an affinity with prehistoric Venuses, which are equally robust and identifiable by their prominent sexual organs. Unlike male forms, which were primarily represented through rudimentary line drawings, female figures in the Paleolithic era—such as Venus with a Horn, found in the Laussel rock shelter in Dordogne, France—were often rendered in three-dimensional relief, and they expressed a vitality similar to the herd in Cap Blanc. Dubuffet made his drawings following World War II , when he was grappling with the exceptional horrors that were exercised by men. The confluence of a brut style, a monstrous form and its lady-likeness conveys Dubuffet’s perspective that the barbaric nature of man is veiled by the manners of civilization.

At approximately the same time that Dubuffet made the corps, Louise Bourgeois produced numerous ink-on-paper works. Through drawing and etching, she worked out unconscious feelings and memories regarding her family and childhood home, and her experiences of giving birth and motherhood. Abstractions of architectural structures such as houses, towers, boxes, ladders and pedestals are animated by amputated limbs, and excised biological forms—including eyes, hair, cells and reproductive organs—bloom independent bodies. In 1947, Bourgeois produced her first book, titled He Disappeared into Complete Silence, composed of nine architectural etchings accompanied by short, seemingly incongruent texts about personal suffering. Exploring the vicissitudes of intimacy, trauma and domiciles preoccupied the artist throughout her practice. She worked against the impulse to convey the monstrous nature of man through the disfiguration of women’s bodies; instead, she chose to seize the forms that her most intimate memories clung to, then deconstruct their facades to reveal their true nature. While it took an exceptional external event for Dubuffet to face man’s barbarism, Bourgeois had experienced it personally her whole life.

The images that comprise Arseneault’s collages titled, The Weight of Things (2025) portray fleeting physical sensations, emotions and feelings, suspended on paper. They express an impulse to share but withhold from representing or describing an experience. This suspension operates through the power of the cut—a tool that creates amputations, gaps and quiet spaces. It is a process that seeks to expand the field of value through evisceration, and one that Arseneault has previously experimented with in the serial works Spectral Maneuver (2022) and Walk-in Drawings (2022). Those collages also portray disembodied limbs and hints of cultural references, supported or suspended in vaporous matter.

An adjacent process is at work in the sculptures Crying Juggler (2024–25) and Crying Acrobat (2024–25). Arseneault’s attention to reducing volume and simplifying detail draws focus to the quality of the forms and lines—the droopy insecurity of the acrobat’s torso, the weeping joints of the juggler’s knees, eyes or clubs. The personhood of each figure is inconsequential. The material that remains is intended to support the action of emotion—that of juggling tears.

These works conjure the notion of “eccentric abstraction,” a term that Lucy Lippard introduced to sculpture in 1966 via the eponymous exhibition that she curated. The exhibition featured work by Bourgeois and Eva Hesse, among others, that expressed vulnerable forms, sensual materials and tactile surfaces. Lippard wanted to expand the conversation on minimalist sculpture that had been concretized in Kynaston McShine’s Primary Structures exhibition earlier that year. The artists in her show respected structuralism, but were equally interested in surrealism, humour and eroticism, and were not afraid of the flaccid, the vulgar or the ugly. Bourgeois exhibited The Portrait (1963), an indecipherable glob of red oxide latex that looks like vomit, and Hesse showed two works, one of which was Ingeminate (1965), a piece of rubber tubing that joins two sausage-shaped forms, like the handles of a limp skipping rope. For Lippard, eccentric abstraction elicited sensorial rather than cerebral or emotional responses to the reconciliation of distinct forms. She believed that soft, fleshy, round or viscous forms did not have to be symbolic or representational, and that we could belie our pareidolic tendency when encountering these new, resonant forms. In retrospect, Lippard’s proposal reads as an attempt to fend off the onslaught of analyses that feminist, postmodern and psychoanalytic critics would unleash on these women’s practices (of note, Susan Sontag published Against Interpretation the same year as the exhibition).

Arseneault’s practice grapples with the tension between the sensorial qualities of form, material and surface and their symbolic capacity. She works with abstract methods to protect the work from overidentification but maintains enough legibility to ground the work in the world. While her practice is aware of emotional and psychological weather in the studio, she treats it like moisture and allows it to vaporize. If I is a monster, let it be eccentric.